I have creative ADD

Trout Project

So I’ve made it to a stopping point with the Trout Project. It’s not as developed as I’d liked but I’m trying to get into the habit if forcing not fully developed content out there. It’s part of Harnessing the Abudance which I’m trying to adopt.

The “Trout Project” aims to emulate field guide illustration with dynamic colors and shapes. The data gets pulled from the colorlovers website. Here is a quick video and some stills.

There it is. For what’s it’s worth here is a laundry list of what I had hoped to accomplish or may revist:

Generative Texture — I wanted one big generative blob across the top of the fish that could be different each time based on color data. Getting a generative pattern like ~this~ would’ve been cool but I had problems figuring out how to make the masking work to fit the fish body.

Generated Small Dots — Would’ve been nice to have a more organic arrangement of the smaller dots. The original plan was to build out method algorithm for spacing them out organically w/out overlapping…but I got bored and frustrated.

Brush Strokes — I briefly played with the idea of doing brush strokes based on existing bitmap information like this. .WAAAY over my head right now.

Letter Spacing — There is very limited typographic support in Processing. The idea, I suppose, is that you can build your own. I fooled around with splitting a string up to get more font spacing but ended up abandoning it.

Scientific Name Generator — Generate a string based on the title of the graphic with a bunch of Latin mixed in.

What I’ve learned is that Processing is really geared towards lower level stuff and I was trying to accomplish too much on my first try. I should’ve stuck to a project where I was drawing primitives. Which is likely what I’ll tackle next.

The color library was really fun to play with and the Processing community seems to be a great bunch of folks:)